Forum: vegan birthday: ten years on CRAN, four years on R-Forge

First CRAN release of vegan was on September 6, 2001: vegan is now ten-years-old. Vegan entered R-Forge on September 6, 2007 or four years ago.

The first vegan release was made soon after R 1.3.1 was release, and in that there were only about 120 contributed extension packages on CRAN. The first release was made to run NMDS like recommended in vegetation science. NMDS was already available in the MASS package (isoMDS), but vegan added missing pieces:

Many of these functions are now incorporated in other functions such metaMDS and envfit, but they are still all parts of vegan, although not very visible. The only living fossil is wisconsin() which has survived unchanged to the latest release (initMDS was changed in rev1792 on Sep 5, 2011).

The other early major version on CRAN were:

1.2-0 (Nov 19, 2001) with decorana().1.4-0 (May 3, 2002) which added constrained ordination methods cca() and rda().1.6 series (from Oct 20, 2003) which added diversity analyses, capscale and metaMDS and expanded old features. 1.8 series with incremental changes and wider authorship, and finally moved to R-Forge.